Derek Brown watches the only Arab soccer team playing in Israel’s premier division BY the side of a sprawling refuse tip, at the end of a twisting dirt track, stands the pride and joy of Tayibeh. A stadium they call it, but they jest. The real joke is that this patch of weeds, with a […]

Lesley Cowling LAST week saw the unusual (though gentlemanly) spectacle of South Africa’s science councils justifying their work and its relevance to the country in open hearings. The hearings are unlikely to have a significant effect on the councils’ budgets for the 1997/1998 financial year, but the process marks the beginning of a new role […]

clinics A report describes the serious lack of basic facilities at many hundreds of health clinics, writes Andy Duffy THE grave lack of basic facilities in clinics around the country, undermining the government’s new health policy, is revealed in a report to be published next month. Hundreds of clinics have no access to electricity and […]

ON the bank of Manhattan’s East River stands an unprepossessing memorial to graffiti artist Keith Haring. Painted on a fragment of concrete wall, it shows blue doves circling above replicas of Haring’s exuberant images. And below, scrawled in dayglo colours is a simple epitaph: “Kiss, Kith, Keith. All are ephemeral.” On the surface none of […]

Bennie Bunsee THAT the Pan Africanist Congress has been going through a trying time is well known. But the M&G’s response to the PAC’s recent convention (“PAC convention achieves little,” September 27 to October 3) misunderstands a genuine attempt to correct the organisation’s problems arising from decades of leadership mismanagement. Getting the PAC right will […]

Nomboniso Gasa writes how as a child in rural South Africa she discovered what abortion was, in an open letter to ANCmembers of Parliament LIKE many of you, it was not at university or as a result of “Western influence” that I learnt of abortion. I was seven years old when I first heard the […]

Cinema: Derek Malcolm THERE have been plenty of films about the drug culture, almost all of them adopting a moral tone that liberals can conveniently call “responsible”. But there have been none quite like Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, adapted from Irvine Welsh’s novel. The film, like the book and the play, shows the pleasure of drug-taking […]

At the Sacob conference, a German industrialist warned South Africa against consensus-building policies, writes Max Gebhardt FOREIGN businessmen, discussing this week’s South African Chamber of Business (Sacob) annual convention at the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, expressed surprise that “big wigs” from Europe were giving South Africa lessons on how to become a winning […]

The team behind Trainspotting is fast becoming the most formidable of talents in British cinema. They talk to Adam Sweeting about their great adventures on the big scereen FROM the team that brought you last year’s black and sardonic thriller Shallow Grave, Trainspotting is certain to be one of the cinematic hot shots of 1996. […]

Rehana Rossouw THEY’VE been labelled reactionaries, racists and gravy-train wannabes, but the group of former United Democratic Front activists, church leaders, youth leaders and unionists behind the “December 1 Movement” believes the political salvation of coloureds lies in their hands. They are gathering in Cape Town this weekend to fine-tune plans for their launch, the […]